A lot of folks believe that the Microsoft empire is doomed, and that the rise of touchscreen computing and mobile devices will lead it its inevitable downfall.
This may very well be true; it certainly is true that to date, Microsoft’s attempts to enter the touch and mobile markets have been poorly received.
Yet much of the time, the smart folks have it wrong.
In the 1980s, Apple’s Macintosh product introduced the graphical user interface (GUI). It was light years ahead of Microsoft’s DOS, and Apple’s brilliant founder, Steve Jobs, openly sneered at Microsoft’s crappy software.
Microsoft tried to catch up by introducing Windows. It was a failure.
Microsoft brought out a second version of Windows. It was also a failure.
Finally, Microsoft brought out Windows 3.1. It was still a crappy knockoff of the MacOS, but it was executed well enough to be a major upgrade over DOS.
The rest is history.
In the 1990s, Netscape’s Navigator introduced the commercial Web browser. Everyone agreed that the Web would change everything, and doom desktop software.
Microsoft tried to catch up by releasing Internet Explorer. It was a failure.
Microsoft brought out a second version of IE. It was also a failure.
Finally, Microsoft brought out IE3. It was still a crappy knockoff of Netscape, but it was executed well enough so that people didn’t really care.
The rest is history.
My point is that it’s very easy to write off Microsoft. It’s never been a cool company. Here in Silicon Valley, it’s the closest thing we ever had to an Evil Empire.
But Microsoft has vast resources, and armies of smart people. Even today, when it is supposedly in its death throes, it has double the staff, revenues, and profits of Google.
And it has a history of bumbling its way to “good enough” when tackling new markets. Bill Gates may yet have the last laugh.
Related articles
- Can Microsoft Get It Right This Time? (fool.com)
- Gartner: Microsoft is dead, Windows has expired, Office has ceased to be (plus.google.com)
- Microsoft, the Walking Dead (cloudave.com)
(Cross-posted @ Adventures in Capitalism)
In the ninties when I transitioned from Unix to Windows I thought MS windows would die off leaving Unix as the dominant platform. Unix was more efficient, faster, ran on much more powerful hardware and was more stable. But Windows ran on machines which cost hundreds of dollars while Unix ran on workstations costing thousands of dollars. And Intel chips got faster but Unix workstations stayed expensive, so cheap won out and WinTel took over.
Things have now changed, MS tablets are the expensive option while Apple and Android are the cheap favorites (running Unix BTW). I don’t see a win for MS in the new scenario, or even a viable exit option. I think MS is at the start of a long downward spiral which no one can stop.
Bill Gates doesn’t run the company anymore. The guy who dose is an idiot who only has his job cause he is an old college buddy of gates.
With the Vista debacle I mostly switched to Linux. With Win7 I partly came back, but they never got back what they lost. Now Win8 has insured I will not be coming back to MS for my computing needs. In tablet land MS is losing to Apple who is well on it’s way to losing to Android. In the gaming world Xbox One is teeing up to be the biggest console failure of all time, basically it’s worse than Win8 as hard as that is to imagine.
In the past when MS failed it could stay afloat because in the beginning they’re competition were either terrible business men(Jobs) or even more technologically inept (IBM) than MS. Later they were able to defeated companies Netscape though shear monopoly power. Now MS has real competition and they are failing on many different fronts simultaneously. Unlike the past MS is locked in a declining trend not a misstep or two.
So yes MS is doomed.